Christine Brooke-Rose: The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

We demand the abolishing of all idylls and a complete reorganisation of generating structures.

Truth is an outmoded institution.

Precisely. Words imply the absence of things just as desire implies the absence of its object.

Yes and discourse occurs only insofar as there is lack of sight, eyelessness is not a provisional state but a structure.

There is a flaw in the judas-eye.

Rubbish. Our object revolution is very much present, and desired.

It can’t be both that’s a polarity. In any case the punishment never falls on the euphoric term, only on the poor Yorick.

He’s dead.

Safe.

Words seeking to be true become false and inversely, words seeking to be false become true. We end up experiencing the feelings that we pretend, one can’t speak, or write, with impunity.

What set pieces of author dead dying and half dead are you dipping into like cannibalistic survivors comrade?

Look it up. Are not all idées reçues?

We demand the closing of all books and looks and the closing of this institution of learning the conspicuous consumption of texts with built-in obsolescence and a capitalist narrative economy now crashing into a middle-class crisis.

And who will close it, an arbitrary act of your fake authority?

Rules are made to be broken in an age that is earthquaking from evolving permanence to permanent revolution.

But from the point of view of the object exchanged the debit goes to the left.

You book-keeper, footman of the bourgeoisie. Close all the books I say. There have to be textual disturbances since you’ve all fallen back into the old ruts, regressed into archaic modalities that simply no longer exist and which can therefore no longer be imposed.

Hear hear.

Oh go fuck yourself.

Very good my friend it’s better than fucking your mother. Who do you think you are, bourgeois little boys dipped carefully into a bloody eye and swaddled in a castration complex to preserve the dirty little family secret that structures society each tale-bearer carrying his code in his mouth until he has eaten himself silly and soft and flabby? That way recuperation lies. We dip you you dip us in a permanent circulation of value-objects with always something added, ex nihilo, swelling out the portrait of the object instituted by itself as a value although its semes are false, with the moving signifier pointing to the falsehood but incapable of decoding it so that although long desired it is maintained in a pregnant plenitude the piercing of which, both liberating and catastrophic, will bring about the end of the goldicondeological discourse.

So that the fat magician lifts you up busting out of sequence to switch the lights to quell the audience he says dragging you out into the wings of a carnival all hierarchy dissolved although you scream not now not now see you later you-narrator the show must go on first we must change the subject find the missing prop the thirty-seventh veil the white white rabbit mannikin out of a black hatch consulting his watching consultant as he falls into a faint.

Meanwhile the timetable crashed into by the bouleversing bulldozers of society as subversion of the text has slipped into another, the talebearer has given birth to another tale-bearer, spokesman of a reality which merely seeks to appear true, separating the upper and the lower waters into sea and sky fornicating with earth in a death-battle with time for a trophy that drops into the sea and rises, feathered in foam, the signifier of signifiers beneath which the truth escapes for pigmaleons into its own depths, retaining its mystery, reflecting at the surface only the sky, despite the underwater plungers.

Iconostasis.

What do we do now, Jacques, the story of our loves has been interrupted again.

Coitus interruptus.

That’s not worthy of you.

No, I never like it. I gather there’s a pill now to structure the family which structures society.

The family has crumbled, together with Oedipus.

Unthroned.

O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

And kings’ daughters.

Undroned.

Transferred to the other place.

A stylus she can’t cramp.

The anti-hero anti-rescuing her from an anti-monster in an anti-romanzo.

It sounds very negative

and therefore singular

and therefore replaceable.

We could clean up the dirty little secret.

Or abolish it.

All deletions in the deep structure must be recoverable, that’s a law, written up there as you would say.

That way recuperation lies. For you are not my master except by a purely verbal gentlemen’s agreement I am yours.

A trace of hierarchy however has been retained despite demand in an institution where the old learn from the young and discussion frequently overflows the framework of this one point. Can a point have a framework? All purely verbal gentlemen should be eliminated. No, every fact of language must be first analysed as a global, social phenomenon. And what about mere linguistic ladies we demand an equal right to elimination. No, to analysis as global social phenomena. You don’t have the floor it’s Jeremy’s turn. Oh god is he still here? Well very briefly I simply want to say the problem isn’t where you think it is. Oh it must have gone out then it was here a moment ago that means we haven’t got a quorum, the problem must be present.

And if present then no longer desired since desire implies the absence of its object as words imply the absence of their referents. Since we are talking about the problem it must therefore be absent.

Slipped through the rectangle of time

into a rectangular stanza into which you

enter saying once upon a time

there lived a credibility obitu-

ary black framed portrait as

an absent value-object of desire:

hence all the semic portraitures

that in the wabe did gyre.

So what do you think, should we kill off Larissa?

She sure asks for it.

Naive speakers indeed!

In fact.

In fact of language, a global social phenomenon.

A balloon half grabbed let it go.

Explode it.

Both liberating and catastrophic.

Well Renata gave us the clue.

She stuffed it with clues and so did Ali why don’t they get together in a clueful grip?

Shall we Renata?

I’m not competing with Saroja of the khol-framed eyes.

Saroja of the oriental adagia has left this class.

Oh you’re eliminating her too?

She has eliminated herself into a cloud of unknowing.

Ah, like Stavro.

No not like him at all he’s a transparent blue lacuna which is quite different. More like Armel, if it weren’t for that illiberal and catastrophic chapter in which you reinvented him as an ideal husband, articulate and crueltobekind, in order to dialogue lunatically with yourself.

What do you mean? That was real.

You hogged the paradismal dialogue my dear. Already Myra slipped him into the wrong rectangle as a black man last term at the flick of a sexual play and that had to be rectified. Tell me how did you spend you summer vacation?

Well, REALLY.

Textually speaking.

Sexually freaking so there.

Good good.

But Ali what do you have against the black people?

I am an Arab I have nothing at all against the black people Eliza.

BUT?

It didn’t fit, that’s all, The text must cohere. For Armel is not like that at all but tall and dislikes answering questions in black and white with a nominervating intelligence and an evasive mouth that wraps him up in the seductive parlour game of superstition disguised as mystery, which is an old illusion, but in which he nevertheless deep down believes.

That’s precisely why one has to reinvent him all the time. I mean that’s why Larissa had to.